What is hate? What is offensive? It's whatever you want it to be!
When in doubt, err on the side of freedom and liberty.
You may disagree with the definition, but that's what people are talking about. If you want to elevate the discussion, you should avoid pointless semantic arguments IMO.
That may be your definition but it is not the definition and certainly is not close to being the "generally understood" definition.
All words are made up but definitions should not change with the wind. What is happening with hate speech is that it has morphed into "speech that a minority group found offensive." This is not a workable definition because what you find offensive is not what I find offensive. The most broadly accepted definition based on the laws I see on wikipedia is "speech that encourages imminent violence."
The only reason we are even discussing this is because people have begged online platforms to police speech. The inevitable conclusion when you police speech is this problem we are discussing right now. You ultimately just devolve into tyranny of the majority where dissenting thoughts are silenced.
>You may disagree with the definition, but that's what people are talking about.
Just because you don't want there to be nuance doesn't make the nuance go away.
> Hate speech is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".
If I may clarify, the key part of the definition is "based on something such as [a core characteristic of a person that has no relationship to the hate] such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". So hating someone for doing something is not hate speech. Hating someone for what they "are" (at their "core", if there's such a thing) is hate speech.
This isn't about finding things offensive (although clearly hate speech is found offensive by most people).
I disagree strongly about whether policing speech inevitably devolves into censorship. We already police speech, for example calls to violence in the US, with no visible devolution. We also police where you can physically be, without limiting your ability to go about your life with no undue policing. The slippery slope argument without supporting evidence is lazy.
No it's not. Here you have Google removing anti-communist speech which is not sexist, not racist and not homophobic. And communists aren't even a minority in China (though thankfully a minority in most of other countries). But "I hate Nazis" is also hate speech, obviously - should Google ban anybody who hates Nazis? Maybe not, you say? So there's some hate that is allowed, but some is verboten. And who decides which is which? Ah, now we are getting to the point of "hate speech" term - "hate speech" is hate I disapprove of. If I approve of it, it's a vigorous and righteous indignation against the evils of this world and should be lauded, but if I disapprove - it's "hate speech" and should be banned. Now we need only do figure out who holds the power to decide these questions... but wait, we already did, Google decides that. All hail Google, the bastion of free speech and protector from the hate speech! I, for one, welcome our new speech overlords.
> Hate speech is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".
This is a workable definition and it doesn't lead to a slippery slope argument.
An interesting part of this discussion is that Youtube is operating globally. There are a number of countries with the concept of “hate speech” in the law. Saying it doesn’t exist in US law is only a partial answer.
Otherwise countries with most restrictive laws basically dictate what is allowed or not to the rest of the world (though in practice that’s already in part the case).
